In reply to a post by ian72:

That makes TalkTalk proposition more understandable to me then. Assuming that the amount of profit they make on voice is outweighing the costs of all the broadband infrastructure/support needed to sell at £3.50 per month.

Yep. Sky and Talktalk pay Openreach a flat fee for use of the copper, there are no additional usage charges for them to pay Openreach for MPF. Therefore in order to make a profit, Sky and Talktalk need to push as many services as possible over that line, hence mandatory line rental when broadband is required.

The mandatory line rental already makes a net profit on MPF irrespective of any call charges, against what they pay Openreach for MPF. The cost of broadband increases that net profit.

It's a "pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap" model, it relies on them getting lots of customers, since it relies on lots of small, incremental bits of income to cover the cost of running their LLU infrastructure. "pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap" doesn't necessarily mean it's poor quality, but the model does need lots of customers to work.

It's in stark contrast to providers who rely on BT Wholesale. As soon as BT Wholesale providers pull in big numbers on unlimited, they are shelling out huge sums on charges to BT Wholesale for bandwidth.

TL;DR - it's profitable to break free from BT Wholesale if you have enough customers.

Plusnet probably are running their gateways too hot, by that I mean there may well be enough overall capacity across the entire span of gateways but with not much headroom meaning it doesnt take much of a misbalance for gateway bottlenecks to occur and hence jumping resolving issues.

Since its pretty much always solvable by jumping and it doesnt happen that often, then I accept it, usually for me the issue occurs after plusnet do a rebalance, so they kick me off and then I may need to manually jump again after that and is ok until they do another kick. Plusnet staff before were claiming its BTw congestion and not their gateways and the reason jumping works is that people then go over a new BTw route, that may be true, but obviously only they know that, I havent found any other BTw based isp's tho where users have BTw issues resolved by hoppping on and off ppp.

By comparison I remember when I was an entanet customer via a reseller, the days when they had their ALT or whatever it was called that would throttle down to 2mbit under worst conditions, it eventually became a common occurance for entanet to effectively be a 2mbit service all weekend. Plusnet's issues are nothing like that, so it puts it into perspective. On the other hand infinity was pretty much flawless, 24/7, no hopping needed, no TM, but also no static ip and 'almost' no uk support.

VM of course I give the congestion crown to, I had some very severe congestion during my years on VM. That I would been grateful for even entanet's 2mbit.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 13-May-14 19:19:36)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Plusnet probably are running their gateways too hot, by that I mean there may well be enough overall capacity across the entire span of gateways but with not much headroom meaning it doesnt take much of a misbalance for gateway bottlenecks to occur and hence jumping resolving issues.

I think so too, but hadn't thought to quite that depth.

Wow wasn't expecting to kick off such a debate.

OK thanks guys, will take on board your advice and will select someone soon.

Hopefully it will all go smoothly, but I know where to come if I am having any problems.